Brennan defends CIA in staff message

3/11/14 6:33 PM EDT

Central Intelligence Agency Director John Brennan defended his agency's actions in a message to CIA personnel on Tuesday, responding to allegations from Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) that the agency was snooping on and trying to undermine its overseers in Congress.

"CIA believes strongly in the necessity of effective, strong, and bipartisan Congressional oversight. We are a far better organization because of Congressional oversight, and as long as I am the Director of CIA, I will do whatever I can to be responsive to the elected representatives of the American people," Brennan wrote in the unclassified workforce message, which POLITICO obtained from a U.S. official who asked not to be named.

"CIA has tried to work as collaboratively as possible with the Committee on its report," Brennan wrote, referring to a still-unreleased report from Feinstein's committee which is reportedly harshly critical of the CIA's interrogation practices during the Bush era. "We have acknowledged and learned from the program’s shortcomings, and we have taken corrective measures to prevent such mistakes from happening again. But we also owe it to the women and men who faithfully did their duty in executing this program to try to make sure any historical account of it is balanced and accurate."

Brennan's message was quite similar to public remarks he made earlier Tuesday during an appearance at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington. However, his message to staff was accompanied by a letter he sent Feinstein in January detailing the background of the current dispute between the CIA and the Senate panel over results of an internal review the agency conducted regarding interrogations.

The letter indicates Brennan viewed the incident as a security breach and proposed a joint investigation.

"You informed me that you were not aware that the Committee staff already had access to the materials that you requested in your letter," the CIA director said in his letter (posted here).

Brennan's letter suggests that Senate staffers hacked into or used some unusual method to access the internal CIA records, but doesn't rule out the possibility that they may somehow have been more readily available to the Senate aides.

"Absent finding and exploiting a vulnerability, the CIA personnel working on the RDI [rendition, detention and interrogation] review should not be able to access any information on the SSCI [Senate Select Committee on Intelligence] side and the SSCI staff working on the RDI review should not be able to access any information on the SSCI side of the network," the CIA director wrote in his Jan. 27 missive.

Feinstein apparently declined the offer for a joint security review. Instead, in a Senate floor speech Tuesday, she acknowledged that Senate staffers breached an agreement with the CIA by taking the documents to a secure Senate facility. However, she said doing so was not illegal and was justified because of the agency previously destroyed videotapes related to the interrogation program and because records previously accessible to Senate staffers sometimes mysteriously disappeared from the system CIA set up to accommodate the Senate probe.